3 ms·

In my experience recorded CDs/DVDs, which I'm assuming extends to writable blueray too, there is often some degradation over time, so you need to check on thing

In my experience recorded CDs/DVDs, which I'm assuming extends to writable blueray too, there is often some degradation over time, so you need to check on things occasionally and transfer to new media as needed. So “never think about it again” doesn't really work, unless you are truly just hoarding and will never read the stuff back! Though I've not used recordable CDs/DVDs for much for years, just occasionally when posting digital photos/videos up to a low-tech type who has limited slow Internet. These days online drives are large enough that I can keep everything I care to have to hand on a local RAID array for easy access, backed up remotely of course, and Internet access is quick and reliable so things that are less important or rare can be streamed or otherwise re-obtained easily. Maybe quality has improved over time?

cassianoleal 3y ago
Yeah, I've recently found some ~20 year old CDs where I had burned some music I produced in my 20s with a friend. I ripped all of them but it took ages and there was a lot of corruption.
- dspillett 3y ago
  I pulled a collection of photos off an old CD-RW for a friend a year-or-so ago. It took some effort but we finally got almost a full copy of everything (just a couple of the files just wouldn't read at all). I ended up trying several optical drives, the disk was most readable in one but some parts it couldn't get we successfully read with a different drive. A few files seemed to read without error reported by the OS (though slowly and you could hear the drives retrying the read a few times) on more than one drive but had corruption from one of them, we manually compared different files of the same name to pick the best. Considering this, I'm surprised how much we did manage to read successfully. There were other things on the disk, MP3s and other such, though we didn't bother trying to rescue these (only the photos were of any significance) so I'm not sure if they were in any better/worse state. Mildly interesting observation: he no longer had a CD/DVD/other reader in a computer at all. No desktop PC and his laptop has no optical drive. The only optical drive he has is a DVD player hooked up to his TV and that is hardly ever used, as most of what it would be used for he has access to via a streaming service or two. I suspect this is not uncommon.
joshspankit 3y ago
PAR files are your friend here
- dspillett 3y ago
  Now there is a blast from the past: I par2 archives being used in usenet binary groups in the early 2000s. Unfortunately they need to be considered before you need to recover the data, which my friend did not. Also/instead having multiple copies would have been useful as one may have survived better (stored in different locations in case the environment in one makes the disk degrade faster). Though neither method removes the need to occasionally test the media to make sure you have enough workable bits to recover the data.
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    Sorry to hear your friend did not. Parity files are imo an wildly underrated tech for long-term storage and something that I currently use for all long-term storage. I’ve even been known to use 1% if I’m relying on ZFS/RAID and just want to “trust but verify”. Off-site and multi-device backups are still vital for anything that’s important enough but as you mention multiple copies does not remove the need to test the media. For anyone who doesn’t know already: they got popular (and probably created) for binary files posted to usenet. Usenet was a high-speed and low-completion platform where files got corrupted all the time. PARity files took the algorithm for RAID and created a new file that could live “next to” the binary files. If you had a 1GB file and 300MB of PAR/PAR2 files could could recover the complete original file even if 30% was missing or corrupted. It still works today on Windows/macOS/Linux.
    - dspillett 3y ago
      > Parity files are imo an wildly underrated tech for long-term storage and something that I currently use for all long-term storage. As a not to others: if following this method for archive purposes, be careful how you are distributing these parity files and those that they relate to. If all your files are on the same physical disk/tape the one physical disk/tape being unreadable kills the whole lot so you are only protecting yourself against errors in individual blocks. To protect against more complete media failures (i.e. a CD/DVD being unreadable) you need to split the data over several disks/tapes. This matches how the system was used on usenet, where each post (of potentially many tens or hundreds making up a large binary post) was essentially a separate bit of storage media. At this point it may just be easier to have multiple copies, though note that even with multiple copies the parity information can be useful as you can detect bit and block level corruption and in many cases correct it (whereas with two copies you can detect corruption, as the copies no longer match, but have no reliable way of knowing which copy, if any, is correct).

cassianoleal 3y ago

Yeah, I've recently found some ~20 year old CDs where I had burned some music I produced in my 20s with a friend. I ripped all of them but it took ages and there was a lot of corruption.

dspillett 3y ago
I pulled a collection of photos off an old CD-RW for a friend a year-or-so ago. It took some effort but we finally got almost a full copy of everything (just a couple of the files just wouldn't read at all). I ended up trying several optical drives, the disk was most readable in one but some parts it couldn't get we successfully read with a different drive. A few files seemed to read without error reported by the OS (though slowly and you could hear the drives retrying the read a few times) on more than one drive but had corruption from one of them, we manually compared different files of the same name to pick the best. Considering this, I'm surprised how much we did manage to read successfully. There were other things on the disk, MP3s and other such, though we didn't bother trying to rescue these (only the photos were of any significance) so I'm not sure if they were in any better/worse state. Mildly interesting observation: he no longer had a CD/DVD/other reader in a computer at all. No desktop PC and his laptop has no optical drive. The only optical drive he has is a DVD player hooked up to his TV and that is hardly ever used, as most of what it would be used for he has access to via a streaming service or two. I suspect this is not uncommon.

joshspankit 3y ago

PAR files are your friend here

dspillett 3y ago
Now there is a blast from the past: I par2 archives being used in usenet binary groups in the early 2000s. Unfortunately they need to be considered before you need to recover the data, which my friend did not. Also/instead having multiple copies would have been useful as one may have survived better (stored in different locations in case the environment in one makes the disk degrade faster). Though neither method removes the need to occasionally test the media to make sure you have enough workable bits to recover the data.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Sorry to hear your friend did not. Parity files are imo an wildly underrated tech for long-term storage and something that I currently use for all long-term storage. I’ve even been known to use 1% if I’m relying on ZFS/RAID and just want to “trust but verify”. Off-site and multi-device backups are still vital for anything that’s important enough but as you mention multiple copies does not remove the need to test the media. For anyone who doesn’t know already: they got popular (and probably created) for binary files posted to usenet. Usenet was a high-speed and low-completion platform where files got corrupted all the time. PARity files took the algorithm for RAID and created a new file that could live “next to” the binary files. If you had a 1GB file and 300MB of PAR/PAR2 files could could recover the complete original file even if 30% was missing or corrupted. It still works today on Windows/macOS/Linux.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    > Parity files are imo an wildly underrated tech for long-term storage and something that I currently use for all long-term storage. As a not to others: if following this method for archive purposes, be careful how you are distributing these parity files and those that they relate to. If all your files are on the same physical disk/tape the one physical disk/tape being unreadable kills the whole lot so you are only protecting yourself against errors in individual blocks. To protect against more complete media failures (i.e. a CD/DVD being unreadable) you need to split the data over several disks/tapes. This matches how the system was used on usenet, where each post (of potentially many tens or hundreds making up a large binary post) was essentially a separate bit of storage media. At this point it may just be easier to have multiple copies, though note that even with multiple copies the parity information can be useful as you can detect bit and block level corruption and in many cases correct it (whereas with two copies you can detect corruption, as the copies no longer match, but have no reliable way of knowing which copy, if any, is correct).